22.06.2001

Liebherr’s "different" City Crane + Financial Results

Designs are now being prepared for Liebherr’s first ever City Crane. The new range will take a year or two to develop and will be “very different from other models now on the market” said Friedrich Bär, managing director of Liebherr-Werk Ehingen in an interview with Kran & Bühne.

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Friedrich Bär

Of particular interest to Bär is the drive system which he described as “very important”. Asked whether Liebherr would consider using a hydrostatic system, Bär replied that the company is looking at all options. He added that the crane would have a forward sloping boom, a single cab and two or three axles. Its price was likely to be set lower than a comparable AT crane.

Liebherr has decided to enter the market because it feels a duty to offer a full range of cranes to its customers said Bär. He predicted that the City Crane concept would never be a mass seller like the company’s 35 tonne LTM 1030/2 all terrrain, for which nearly 300 orders are expected this year, but said that it was certainly of interest in industrial and urban locations.

Liebherr has also announced that it is designing a sideways superlift boom attachment which will be suitable for use with 500 tonne capacity cranes.

* Liebherr has announced some financial results for its Ehingen factory. Mr Bär said: "we continued our successful pattern of growth by building 1,020 new cranes and also selling 490 pre-owned machines for a total turnover of 1,532 million German Marks (DM), a 7 percent increase on the previous year. Turnover has in fact more than doubled since 1995, and new crane sales have also increased by almost 100 percent in the same period. Of last year’s total new-crane turnover of 1,128 million DM, about 90 percent came from our range of all-terrain mobile cranes and the re-maining 10 percent from sales of crawler-track cranes.

A total of 2.638 AT cranes were sold worldwide in the year 2000 – Liebherr says it sold 36.3 per cent of these which would make it the world leader.

The full text of Mr Bär’s market analysis, and two speeches by his colleagues Dr Hamme and Mr Hause, is available in the Library section of vertikal.net